A high-budget game with a large development team, or game studios that make them. AAA games are usually multiplatform, have multimillion dollar marketing budgets, and plan to sell over one million copies.[1]

A first-person shootercheat that lets players shoot other player-characters without aiming. In most cases, the reticle locks on to a target within the player's line of sight and the player only has to pull the trigger. Aimbots are one of the most popular cheats in multiplayer FPS, used since 1990's Quake.[2]

A term used in many role-playing and strategy games to describe attacks or other effects that affect multiple targets within a specified area. For example, in the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, a fireball spell will deal damage to anyone within a certain radius of where it strikes. This term is not limited to just role-playing games, however; in most tactical strategy gamesartillery weapons have an area of effect that will damage anyone within a radius of the strike zone.

Area of effect can also refer to spells and abilities that are non-damaging and non-explosive. For example, a powerful healing spell may affect anyone within a certain range of the caster (often only if they are a member of the caster's party). Many games also have what are sometimes referred to as "aura" abilities that will affect anyone in the area around the person with the ability. For example, many strategy games have hero or officer units that can improve the morale and combat performance of friendly units around them. The inclusion of AoE elements in game mechanics can increase the role of strategy, especially in turn-based strategy games. The player has to place units wisely to mitigate the possibly devastating effects of a hostile area of effect attack; however, placing units in a dense formation could result in gains that outweigh the increased AoE damage received.

Point-blank area of effect (abbreviated PBAoE) is a subset of AoE in which the affected region is centered on the character that is performing the ability, rather than a location of the player's choosing. That term, however, is rarely used by players because of its relatively higher complexity to spell out. Thus AoE is more favorably used, especially in MMO games.

Also known as display mode or show mode, attract mode is a pre-recorded demonstration of a video game that is displayed when the game is not being played.[3] Originally built into arcade games, the main purpose of the attract mode is to entice passers-by to play the game.[3] It usually displays the game's title screen, the game's story (if it has one), its high score list, sweepstakes (on some games) and the message "Game Over" or "Insert Coin" over or in addition to a computer-controlled demonstration of gameplay. In Atari home video games of the 1970s and 1980s, the term attract mode was sometimes used to denote a simple screensaver that slowly cycled the display colors to prevent phosphor burn-in while the game was not being played. Attract modes demonstrating gameplay are common in current home video games.

Attract mode is not only found in arcade games, but in most coin-operated games like pinball machines, stacker machines and lots of other games. Cocktail arcade machines on which the screen flips its orientation for each player's turn in two-player games traditionally have the screen's orientation in player 1's favour for the attract mode.

Auto-aim

Also known as aim-assist is a gameplay mechanic built into many games to decrease the level of difficulty. The game itself has the ability to lock onto or near targets for faster aiming. Games such as the newer Grand Theft Auto titles utilize "hard" or "soft" aim settings to respectively either lock directly onto an enemy or assist the player's aim towards the enemy while giving some freedom of precision for headshots. It is not to be confused with aimbots.

A campaign mode, story mode, or simply campaign refers to one of several possible operating modes of a game in which levels are specifically encountered in a linear or branching fashion, often with more story elements present compared to other modes (such as a skirmish mode or sound test).

Camping

A controversial strategy in which a player stays in one place – preferably a fortified, high-traffic location – for an extended period of time and waits to ambush other players.[4] It is most common in first-person shooter games.[5] Spawn camping, or spawnkilling, is a related strategy in which players camp at a spawn point.

A7Xpg gives the player the opportunity to continue playing after losing his or her last life.

A common term in video games for the option to continue the game after all of the player's lives have been lost, rather than ending the game and restarting from the very beginning. There may or may not be a penalty for doing this, such as losing a certain number of points or being unable to access bonus stages. In arcade games, when a player loses or fails an objective, they will generally be shown a "continue countdown" screen, in which the player has a certain limited amount of time to insert additional coins in order to continue the game from the point where it had ended by pressing the start button; deciding not to continue will result in the displaying of a Game over screen.[6] The continue feature was added to arcade games in the mid-1980s due to arcade owners wanting to earn more money from players who played for longer periods of time.[6] The first arcade game to have a continue feature was Fantasy.[6] As a result of the continue feature, games started to have stories and definite endings; however, those games were designed so that it would be nearly impossible to get to the end of the game without continuing.[6] Salen and Zimmerman argue that the continue feature in games such as Gauntlet was an outlet for conspicuous consumption.[7]

The minimum length of time that the player needs to wait after using an ability before they can use it again. Similar to the reload time and firing rate of weapons. For example, a machine gun has very fast firing rate, so it has a very low cooldown between shots. Comparatively, a shotgun has a long reload/cooldown time between each shots. Cooldown also can be used to 'balance' a weapon such as a turret-mounted machine gun having infinite ammunition, since it can only sustain continuous fire until reaching a threshold at which the weapon would have to cool down (hence the term) before it could be fired again.

In design terms, cooldown can also be thought of as an inverted 'casting time' where instead of requiring a wait time before using an ability, cooldown may replace casting time and put the wait after the ability is activated. This creates a new dimension to the balancing act of casting speed versus power: "lower cooldown, faster cast, but weaker strength" versus "higher cooldown, slower cast, but greater strength." This sort of mechanic is integral to such games as World of Warcraft, where cooldown management is key to higher-level play and various abilities deal with cooldown (for example, cooldown reduction or immediately finishing cooldown on certain abilities). From the technical point of view, cooldown can also be used to assert control over frequency of cast (for spamming) in order to maintain a fluid frame rate and ping. For example, in the game Diablo II, cooldown was added in the form of a patch to several graphically and CPU intensive spells (blizzard, frozen orb, hydra, etc.) to solve the problem of extreme lag caused by players spamming these spells in multiplayer.

Moves and attacks in fighting games (like those from the Street Fighter series) have the amount of time each of them take to execute measured in "frames" (1/60th of a second per frame). Each move has a certain amount of frames in which it is considered to be "recovering" before another move can be executed, which is similar to cooldowns in concept. However, unlike the concept of the cooldown, where a move, spell or ability is considered to be cooling down before it can be used again but control over one's character/unit is still available, the recovery frames of a move in a fighting game do not allow the player to perform any other attacks or movement until the move has fully recovered. Because of this mechanic, strategic use of skills is necessary to make sure the opponent cannot immediately counter the player during the recovery phase of an attack, since it leaves the player wide open.

A 4-directional rocker button on nearly every console controller. Allows for the player to direct game action in eight different directions (up, down, left, right, and the diagonals involving two of these)

The opposite of a buff, an effect placed on a character that negatively impacts their statistics and characteristics. Can also refer to effects that nullify or cancel the effects of buffs. Also known as a nerf.

Found primarily in adventure games, a means of providing a menu of dialog choices to the player when interacting with a non-player character as to learn more from that character, influence the character's actions, and otherwise progress the game's story. The tree nature comes from typically having multiple branching levels of questions and replies that can be explored.

A software program that is designed to replicate the software and hardware of a video game console on more modern computers and other devices. Emulators typically include the ability to load in software images of cartridges and other similar hardware-based game distribution methods from the earlier hardware generations, in addition to more traditional software images.

(Sometimes called "invincibility frames") An invincibility or immunity to damage that occurs after the player takes damage for a short time, indicated by the player's character blinking or "buffering", to prevent the player from taking any immediate additional damage again until it wears off.

The player cannot see enemy activity beneath the greyed out fog of war.

A means by which a portion of a game map may remain hidden or without visibility of units occupying that region, typically due to lack of visibility (a function of the gameplay mechanics) or having been unexplored. Common in strategic or tactical game genres

Ghost cars in racing games generally appear as translucent or flashing versions of the player's vehicle. Based on previously recorded lap times, they serve only to represent the fastest lap time and do not interact dynamically with other competitors. A skilled player will use the ghost to improve his time, matching the ghost's racing line as it travels the course. Many racing games, including Gran Turismo, F-Zero, and Mario Kart, offer a ghost function. Some also show ghosts set by staff members and developers, often showing perfect routes and lap times. A variation of the feature, dubbed by Firemonkeys Studios as "Time-Shifted Multiplayer", was implemented in the mobile racing game Real Racing 3.[10] It works by recording the lap times of people in each race, and using statistics from other players for the game's artificial intelligence to recreate their lap times for the player to beat. The ghost cars can collide with the player and other vehicles, and are fully visible to the player.

In some rhythm games, such as the Elite Beat Agents and Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! games multiplayer mode, you can choose to use your saved replay data as one of the players instead of playing the game yourself.

A cheat that makes player-characters invulnerable.[2] Occasionally adds invincibility, where the player can hurt enemies by touching them (e.g., the Super Mario Super Star).[11] The effect can also be temporary.[12]

Donkey Kong has a kill screen caused by an overflow condition, where the game timer kills the player before it is possible to beat the level.[17] Ars Technica calls it the "second-most famous kill screen of all of gaming"[17] and Wired described it as "mythic".[21][22] This was popularized in the documentary The King of Kong.[17]

Duck Hunt also has a kill screen after level 99 in which the ducks become invincible and fly at a high speed.[17]

Galaga's kill screen occurs on level 256 (level 0), when an integer overflow occurs and the game turns into a blank screen that Joshuah Bearman described as "an existential void".[23]

The practice of arranging to get credit for killing an enemy, when it should have clearly been another player's kill.

Knock-back

When a character in a fighting game or platform game gets hit by an attack, it might experience being knocked back. During knock-back, the character is unable to change its direction until a short animation is finished.[24] Knock-back commonly results in falling down pits as the player loses control of their character.

A specialized game controller which the player points at their television screen or monitor to interact with the game. The controller has means to determine where the player is aiming on the screen as to have the game respond appropriate to a firing action.

Also known as Hunt-the-pixel, refers to a common trope in old adventure games when players had to find very small items hidden in pixellated graphics. It is a term used to describe some computer game interfaces involving point and click with a mouse. The term is usually applied to adventure games in which the primary difficulty with some portion of the game lies in finding an object on the screen. In some cases, the required object is quite small, and may be only a few pixels in size. The player may not have any idea what to look for, but often the game cannot progress without finding it. Players often apply the term to any game in which the gameplay is hindered by the frustrating task of determining precisely where on the screen to click.

An example of pixel hunting appears from The X-Files: The Game, where a vital clue is a bullet exactly 2x2 pixels in size. Other examples can be found in Dark Seed, where the player must locate a small bobby pin lying on the floor of a library, or in Beneath a Steel Sky, where the player must identify and use (without prompting) such tiny items as a 2x2 pixel lump of putty, a thumb-sized metal plate in a poorly lit club, and a barely distinguishable light socket in an abandoned metro tunnel. Pixel hunting is also crucial in Future Wars, where items are not only hard to find and required relatively late in respect to their original location but also, to successfully find an item, the player character has to stand close to its location on the screen. Dreamweb actually incorporates a "magnifying glass" effect with a sighting reticle into its interface to assist the player in locating the many infinitesimal hotspots scattered thickly through its rooms. The problem was endemic in the controversial adventure Limbo of the Lost, which featured minuscule, crucial objects in deep shadow, sometimes off the edge of the screen or obscured by the game's status bar.

Missed objects will not always lead to an unwinnable situation, but sometimes will offer just better alternative approaches to future puzzles, being thus something like Easter eggs. Some games made by Sierra On-Line, including Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers and portions of the Space Quest and King's Quest series, featured interfaces that at times required a hunt-the-pixel approach. One situation in LucasArts's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, which required the player to locate a particular book among several screens full of book stacks. However, LucasArts games have the advantage of a status line indicating the object the cursor is currently over. Another remedy was to make essential objects flash, or some other method to make the element more visible against the benign background, as is done for example at the beginning of King's Quest VI with Alexander's twinkling insignia ring on the beach. In LucasArt's Sam and Max Hit the Road the cursor will have a red border when above a clickable location. The Simon the Sorcerer series avoided pixel hunting all together, by allowing the player to press F10 at any time to highlight all the hotspots on the current screen.

Pixel-hunting is extremely common in games of the escape the room genre. Players must not only find and click on very small items, but sometimes must also find very small arbitrary, and invisible hotspots in order to trigger a change in point of view. Many authors of on-line Flash point-and-click adventure games have disabled the tab key to prevent players from easily cycling through all the hotspots. Digital Spy argues having "a cursor that changes shape when over an item of interest" makes this problem "nonexistent".[25]

In video games environments, room-over-room is the placement of a room directly above another, something originally impossible in id Software's Doom series as the original Doom games did all mapping in 2D, while height variance was done via numbers. In true 3D engines to follow, such as the Quake engine, room-over-room became an easy effect to pull off.

A simplified example of a skill tree structure, in this case for the usage of firearms.

A character development gaming mechanic typically seen in role-playing games. A skill tree consists of a series of skills (sometimes known as perks or by other names) which can be earned by the player as he or she levels up or otherwise progresses his or her player character. These skills grant gameplay benefits to the player; for example, giving the character the ability to perform a new action, or giving a boost to one of the character's stats.[26]

A skill tree is called a "tree" because it uses a tiered system and typically branches out into multiple paths. A tiered skill tree will require a player to achieve certain skills before the next tier of skills become available. The player may be required to achieve all skills in one tier before moving on to the next tier, or may only be required to complete prerequisites for individual branches. Skill trees are a common tool used for in-game balancing by game designers. Skill trees also offer a "game within a game" in which players are not only playing a video game, but their decisions on how they allocate points into their skill trees will affect their overall gaming experience as they play on.[27]

The action roleplaying game, Diablo II, released over ten years ago, is often cited as the true innovator of in depth skill trees.[28]

In arcade games, the title screen is shown as part of the attract mode loop, usually after a game demonstration is played. The title screen, as well as the high score list, urges potential players to insert coins. In console games, especially if the screen is not merged with the main menu, it urges the player to press start. Similarly, in computer games, the message "Hit any key" is often displayed. Controls that lack an actual "Start" button use a different prompt; in the Nintendo Wii, for example, usually prompts to press the "A" button and the "B" trigger simultaneously, as in Super Mario Galaxy 2 or Mario Party 9. Fan-made games often parody the style of basis of the creation.

A cheat that makes walls translucent.[2] Some wallhacks also let players shoot weapons or physically pass through walls (noclip).[9]

Wall jump

A jump performed off of a wall to propel the player in the opposite direction. Wall jumps between two tight walls can be done in quick succession to climb vertically. As a special jump, it is sometimes an acquired skill instead of available from the game's start.[8]

A phrase spoken by a fighting gamecharacter after defeating an opponent. In older games such as Fatal Fury and traditionally in 2D fighting games such as Capcom vs. SNK, it is not an actual voice sample, but text superimposed on an image of the winning character, occasionally depicted alongside the visibly injured defeated character (Street Fighter II for example). Win quotes are rarely particularly profound, and are often little more than trash talk, but they help players to understand and identify with the characters.

In most games, characters have one or more win quotes that they use indiscriminately, but sometimes special win quotes are used in special circumstances. For example, in The King of Fighters '94, each character has special win quotes against each of the 8 teams; in Street Fighter Alpha, players can choose one of four win quotes by holding certain button combinations after winning a battle; in Street Fighter III: Giant Attack, characters sometime use special win quotes if they finish the battle with a certain move; and in SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium, players can input their own win quotes in edit mode.

^Salen, Katie; Zimmerman, Eric. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. 2004. p. 264, found at Google Books "[Gauntlet's escalating difficulty] can turn Gauntlet into a completely different kind of conflict, one in which players compete to demonstrate their tolerance for putting money into the game, a form of conspicuous consumption much like high-stakes gambling."